In logic, when propositions have the form "IF X THEN Y", then "X" is the antecedent of the hypothetical proposition. For example, in the statement "If enough people vote, she will win", then "enough people voting" is the antecedent.

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But I ought to understand how limited the possibilities of a firm like his were to hire a boy of my antecedents.

Malcolm Gladwell -- Outliers

He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby

It was the first time it had ever been so complemented, and Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better.

Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities

To look up the antecedents of all these people, to discover their bona fides -all that takes time and endless inconvenience.

Agatha Christie -- Murder On The Orient Express

Nothing peculiar about her family antecedents, is there?

Kate Chopin -- The Awakening

Without any antecedent knowledge, without any warning whatever that such existed, he found himself an explorer in a totally new world.

Jack London -- White Fang

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Mothers found strange men calling on their daughters, men who came without letters of introduction and whose antecedents were unknown.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

The book itself had the appearance of having been stolen from some court of justice, and perhaps his knowledge of its antecedents, combined with his own experience in that wise, gave him a reliance on its powers as a sort of legal spell or charm.

Charles Dickens -- Great Expectations

The Lascar was known to be a man of the vilest antecedents, but as, by Mrs. St. Clair’s story, he was known to have been at the foot of the stair within a very few seconds of her husband’s appearance at the window, he could hardly have been more than an accessory to the crime.

Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Instead the story resonates with the richness of distant antecedents, with the power of accumulated myth.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Perhaps the most striking Eastern literary antecedent to The Iliad is the story of Gilgamesh, which derives from Sumerian legends that reach back to the third millennium.

Homer -- The Iliad

It resulted from these antecedents that everyone entered heartily into the purpose for which they met; besides, it would not be unlikely that they would have an opportunity of playing either the cardinal or his people an ill turn, and for such expeditions these worthy gentlemen were always ready.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

By discarding a claim to knowledge of the ultimate purpose, we shall clearly perceive that just as one cannot imagine a blossom or seed for any single plant better suited to it than those it produces, so it is impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted down to the smallest detail for the purpose they had to fulfill, than Napoleon and Alexander with all their antecedents.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

Those are the antecedents, and the culmination.

Charles Dickens -- Hard Times

Let us put it down to his deplorable antecedents and education, if you wish.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

And where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

For any one war seemed so rooted in its antecedents.

T. H. White -- The Once and Future King

The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the human.

James Joyce -- Ulysses

I wish you to marry a young man with other antecedents—a young man who could give positive guarantees.

Henry James -- Washington Square

Or if the traditional birth image is remembered, nothing is said of an antecedent marriage.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Donald brought his wife forward without hesitation, it being obvious that he had no suspicion whatever of any antecedents in common between her and the now journeyman hay-trusser.

Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge

He longed to know everything about the splendid fellow—his salary, preferences, antecedents, how best one might please him.

E.M. Forster -- A Passage to India

Moreover, by chance or by devilry, the ministrant was antecedently made interesting by being a handsome stranger who had evidently seen better days.

Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd

Steve had been a teacher of Afrikaans, and he not only spoke perfect Afrikaans but its antecedent, High Dutch.

Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom

’My only response is that I’m entirely too kind and experienced to speculate on your antecedents.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy

His instinct was to regard her as a conspirator against rather than as an antecedent obstacle to Thomasin’s happiness.

Thomas Hardy -- The Return of the Native

In this, therefore, I think we are agreed; but that this honour can be said to be founded on religion, to which it is antecedent, if by religion be meant any positive law—

Henry Fielding -- Tom Jones

When they had passed up the church and were standing in their places Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the edge of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the business of giving her away.

Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure

At these passionate interjections, mere incoherences to the listener as yet unapprised of the antecedents, the Surgeon was profoundly discomposed.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse.

Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2

That I have some claim to the exercise of a veto here, would not, I believe, be denied by any reasonable person cognizant of the relations between us: relations which, though thrown into the past by your recent procedure, are not thereby annulled in their character of determining antecedents.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

He had come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott’s English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and when Medora Manson announced her cousin’s engagement to him it was felt to be one more act of folly in poor Medora’s long record of imprudences.

Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence

…who enjoy a period of high appreciation and full-blown eulogy; in many respectable families throughout this realm, relatives becoming creditable meet with a similar cordiality of recognition, which in its fine freedom from the coercion of any antecedents, suggests the hopeful possibility that we may some day without any notice find ourselves in full millennium, with cockatrices who have ceased to bite, and wolves that no longer show their teeth with any but the blandest intentions.

George Eliot -- The Mill on the Floss

This rubbishy "Neuro-hypnotism," however beribboned with new terminologies, is only Mesmerism, or Animal Magnetism, re-writ; and that sickly nonsense was discredited long ago, as being merely a solemn-sounding blind, behind which men of questionable antecedents and salacious natures might obtain power over young women of the same, asking them impertinent and offensive questions and ordering them to perform immodest acts, without the latter appearing to consent to it.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

In his Foundations of Science Poincaré explained that the antecedents of the crisis in the foundations of science were very old.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind.

Your brother told me that my antecedents and occupations were against me; that your family stands, somehow, on a higher level than I do.

Henry James -- The American

But his true fighting weight, his antecedents, his amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon—all these were as uncertain to ordinary mortals as were the escapades of Zeus.

E.M. Forster -- Howards End

With such antecedents it will occasion the reader no wonder if he learns that Mabel viewed the novel scene before her with a pleasure far superior to that produced by vulgar surprise.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Pathfinder

I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse.

This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society.

Clement Greenberg -- Avant-garde and Kitsch

Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the Almighty, or with ourselves.’

Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit

For if he that doeth it, hath not passed away his originall right to do what he please, by some Antecedent Covenant, there is no breach of Covenant; and therefore no Injury done him.

Thomas Hobbes -- Leviathan

Your pronoun needs an antecedent, don’t you see," he would say, very primly.

Russell Baker -- Growing Up

2 O but it is not the years—it is I, it is You, We touch all laws and tally all antecedents, We are the skald, the oracle, the monk and the knight, we easily include them and more, We stand amid time beginningless and endless, we stand amid evil and good, All swings around us, there is as much darkness as light, The very sun swings itself and its system of planets around us, Its sun, and its again, all swing around us.